Designing of Container Feeder Service Networks Under Unstable Demand Conditions

The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly magnified supply challenges in all industries, and virus waves continue to cause an extraordinary amount of variation in both the demand for and the availability of necessary products. This uncertainty has also forced many organizations including container liner shipping to redesign their supply chain. Feeder services from hub ports are essential chain of shipping networks. This chapter addresses the design of feeder networks under consideration of demand fluctuations over the year. For this purpose, a perturbation-based variable neighbourhood search approach is developed in order to determine the feeder ship fleet size and mix, the fleet deployment, service routes, and voyage schedules to minimize operational costs. In the case study investigation, the authors consider the feeder network design problem faced by a feeder shipping company as a sample application. The performance of alternate network configurations is compared under dynamic demand conditions. Numerical results highlight the advantage of dynamic and flexible design of feeder service networks.

Evaluating recovery strategies for the disruptions in liner shipping networks: a resilience approach

PurposeSince the start of the current century, the world at large has experienced uncertainties as a result of climate change, terrorism threats and increasing economic upheaval. These uncertainties create non-classical risks for global seaborne container trade and liner shipping networks (LSNs). The purpose of this paper is to establish a novel risk-based resilience framework to measure the effectiveness of different recovery strategies for the disruptions in LSNs in a quantitative manner.Design/methodology/approachBased on a resilience loss triangle model, an indicator of resilience–cost ratio is designed to measure the performance of LSNs during recovery. Four recovery strategies are proposed to test the rationality and feasibility of the developed indicator in aiding decision-making of LSNs from a resilience perspective.FindingsThe analysis results reveal that the superiorities of different recovery strategies vary depending on both the structures of LSNs and the specific requirements during recovery. Moreover, optimizing the sequence of ports being recovered will improve the overall recovery efficiency of the investigated LSN.Research limitations/implicationsAs an exploratory research trying to enrich the risk-based resilience evaluation of LSNs from a complex network perspective, only two attributes (e.g. port scare and economy) are considered at the current stage when estimating the time needed to fully recover the whole LSN. In future research, more attributes from the industry may be identified and incorporated into the proposed model to further extend its ability and application scopes.Practical implicationsThe findings will help to improve managerial understandings of recovery strategies to build more resilient LSNs. The proposed model has the capability to be tailored to tackle different types of risks in addition to the storm disaster condition.Originality/valueThe risk-based resilience framework and the resilience–cost ratio indicator are newly developed in this research. They can consider LSNs' structural resilience and the total costs that a recovery strategy needs to restore the whole system simultaneously.

Estimating international trade status of countries from global liner shipping networks

Maritime shipping is a backbone of international trade and, thus, the world economy. Cargo-loaded vessels travel from one country's port to another via an underlying port-to-port transport network, contributing to international trade values of countries en route. We hypothesize that ports that involve trans-shipment activities serve as a third-party broker to mediate trade between two foreign countries and contribute to the corresponding country's status in international trade. We test this hypothesis using a port-level dataset of global liner shipping services. We propose two indices that quantify the importance of countries in the global liner shipping network and show that they explain a large amount of variation in individual countries' international trade values and related measures. These results support a long-standing view in maritime economics, which has yet to be directly tested, that countries that are strongly integrated into the global maritime transportation network have enhanced access to global markets and trade opportunities.